What are Terms and Conditions

Terms and Conditions are a set of rules and guidelines that a user must agree to in order to use your website or mobile app. It acts as a legal contract between you (the company) who has the website or mobile app and the user who access your website and mobile app.

It’s up to you to set the rules and guidelines that the user must agree to. You can think of your Terms and Conditions agreement as the legal agreement where you maintain your rights to exclude users from your app in the event that they abuse your app, and where you maintain your legal rights against potential app abusers, and so on.

Terms and Conditions are also known as Terms of Service or Terms of Use.

This type of legal agreement can be used for both your website and your mobile app. It’s not required (it’s not recommended actually) to have separate Terms and Conditions agreements: one for your website and one for your mobile app.

You can use this agreement anywhere, regardless what platform your business operates on:

• Websites
• WordPress blogs or blogs on any kind of platform: Joomla!, Drupal etc.
• E-commerce shops
• Mobile apps: iOS, Android or Windows phone
• Facebook apps
• Desktop apps
• SaaS apps

Desktop apps usually have the EULA agreement (End-User License Agreement) instead of a Terms and Conditions agreement, but your business can use both. Mobile apps are increasingly using Terms and Conditions along with the EULA if the mobile app has an online service component, i.e. it connects with a server.

What to include in a Terms and Conditions

In your Terms and Conditions, you can include rules and guidelines on how users can access and use your website and mobile app.

Use the Terms and Conditions Generator to create the Terms & Conditions agreement.

Download the Terms and Conditions template by clicking here. It’s free.

Here are few examples:

1. The Intellectual Property disclosure will inform users that the contents, logo and other visual media you created is your property and is protected by copyright laws.
2. A Termination clause will inform that users’ accounts on your website and mobile app or users’ access to your website and mobile (if users can’t have an account with you) can be terminated in case of abuses or at your sole discretion.
3. A Governing Law will inform users which laws govern the agreement. This should the country in which your company is headquartered or the country from which you operate your website and mobile app.
4. A Links To Other Web Sites clause will inform users that you are not responsible for any third party websites that you link to. This kind of clause will generally inform users that they are responsible for reading and agreeing (or disagreeing) with the Terms and Conditions or Privacy Policies of these third parties.
5. If your website or mobile app allows users to create content and make that content public to other users, a Content section will inform users that they own the rights to the content they have created.

   The “Content” clause usually mentions that users must give you (the website or mobile app developer) a license so that you can share this content on your website/mobile app and to make it available to other users.

   Because the content created by users is public to other users, a DMCA notice clause (or Copyright Infringement ) section is helpful to inform users and copyright authors that, if any content is found to be a copyright infringement, you will respond to any DMCA takedown notices received and you will take down the content.

6. A Limit What Users Can Do clause can inform users that by agreeing to use your service, they’re also agreeing to not do certain things. This can be part of a very long and thorough list in your Terms and Conditions agreements so as to encompass the most amount of negative uses.